Opschaling van biodiversiteitsanalyses van vijvers: inzicht in de gemeenschapsstructuur van de vijverbiota op meerdere ruimtelijke schalen

Zooplankton inhabiting ponds has been a key model system to study metacommunities. Capitalizing on the wealth of existing data supplemented with my own data, I want to apply novel analysis methods to explore hitherto ignored but potentially important drivers of metacommunity assembly, notably co-occurrences among species, patch- and species-specific processes, and the importance of regional drivers at different spatial scales. In addition, I will monitor the assembly of two evolving metacommunities in newly created pondscapes to study the importance of priority effects, covariation between assembly and environment, and parallels between ecological (community) and genetic (population) assembly. This study aims at elucidating crucially important drivers of metacommunity structure in an effort to enhance our capacity to explain and predict metacommunity structure in nature. This has important value for biodiversity conservation, nature restoration and community ecological theory.